www.guidetopharmacology.org

Getting it out there:

Social media for GtoPdb and GPCRDB

Dr Christopher Southan

For the Gloriam Group, University of Copenhagen

May 2015

1

Introduction

• Scientists are like genes; they only get noticed when they

express themselves

• We are in the midst of a web-enabled revolution in

scholarly communication

• This revolution cannot be precisely circumscribed but

Social Media, Altmetrics, Open Access and Open Data

are central strands

• There are successful scientists who to appear to ignore all

this (but they probably delegate)

• The rest of us need to engage as teams and individuals

• Adeptness at this is becoming career-enhancing

2

Tools of the revolution

3

Team Social Media: The April 2015 GtoPdb report

• 2913 ‘likes’, up from 532 in October 2014

• 589 followers, up from 496 in October 2014

• We now have a blog on WordPress, with 23 posts as of

April 2015

• Our SlideShare account includes slide sets and posters

from the team

• We also have a Guide to PHARMACOLOGY company

page on

• We maintain a presence on Wikipedia, with a page

describing the background, development, content and

features of the resource

Team Twitter

• A GtoPdb retweet of my

post reaches extra 550

• My RT of a GtoPdb

post reaches extra 177

5

550 45 177

GtoPdb intersect

Me

Individual (professional) Twitter presence

6

Twitter accounts I follow

7

Reciprocal contacts with RT networks < 1000

8

Between relevant and “push” followers

• Many twitter accounts I follow have over 50% spurious followers

• I purge ~ 2-4 per week by “blocking”

• A general Social Media problem

• Includes pushes into your Google + circles

• LinkedIN connection requests from strangers with no context

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Familiar?

10

Altmetrics: Immediate impact assessment

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Open access stats and citations

12

Citations in PMC = 245

In Google Scholar = 53

Citations in PMC = 4

In Google Scholar = 14

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Team blog

14

Personal blog

15

The “In the Pipeline” effect

16

Google +: Useful but in decline ?

17

Wikipedia: An important presence

18

Google: Rankings matter

19

LinkedIN “Likes” flash across multiple networks

20

LinkedIN groups: Patchy utility

21

LinkedIN: The network advantage

22

Team Slideshare: Post-conference exposure

23

Individual Slideshare

24

Individual

Slideshare

Stats

25

Figshare: better than supplementary data

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Conclusions

• Papers, citations, meeting presentations, grant apps and database entries remain our core business

• However, its wise to be cognisant of the revolution I have outlined in these slides

• Exploiting the individual and team utilities can pay off in real outreach and impacts

• There are no rules or “correct” ways of doing any of this (its anarchy out there)

• There are many creative ways of working the systems

• Notwithstanding, its probably better to be succinct, professional and polite

• Yes, it can waste some time, but then so can many things….

29

Acknowledgements, Info and Qs

GtoPdb database team:

• Adam Pawson,

• Helen Benson

• Elena Faccenda

• Joanna Sharman

• Jamie Davies

See “Beyond the paper cv and developing a scientific profile online,

Antony Williams” (Slideshare)

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